I just returned from the Visitor Studies Association (VSA) annual conference in Houston. This year’s theme was “Theory, Practice & Conversations,” and the conference was structured for attendee participation—the opening plenary was pitched as potentially “one of the best opening sessions ever, as the speaker is . . . YOU!”

What made the conference such a success this year—and judging from all the wonderful comments I’ve received, I am convinced it was a success—is that the conference organizers focused on drawing out and featuring participant artistic creativity and expression. Not just talk-backs and graffiti boards for attendees to respond to and comment on the conference, but activities and times where attendees could BE CREATIVE—through poetry, art-making, and even interpretive dance (yes, interpretive dance, which might sound silly, but was actually very energizing).

Throughout the course of the conference, I was struck by a sense that conference attendees were behaving a bit differently. They were more animated, they seemed to be interacting with each other more openly, and the conversations seemed to be more about possibilities than problems. Of course (and ironically, given that this was a Visitor Studies Conference) I have no data to back this up, and I am biased to the extreme. But I kept drawing parallels to visitors in our museums and exhibitions.

The presence of opportunities for visitor artistic creation undoubtedly changes the ways they experience the rest of the museum. In addition to asking visitors to respond to our creative work, how can we create situations where visitors do the creating? I have long been a proponent of visitor co-design, and am interested in pushing that idea a bit, to consider exhibits where visitors have been given the creative control in MAKING the experience. Do any of you have examples to share with us?

ExhibitFiles members will be participating in the ISE PI Summit 2008 , July 25-26, when leaders of informal science education projects supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) gather here in Washington, D.C. More than 180 projects will be represented at the Summit, including not only exhibitions, but a range of media, from youth and community programs to broadcast media and online games.

NSF has been supporting the development of ExhibitFiles, so the site can serve as a resource for the science exhibition field. Exhibits people typically rely on personal memories and social networks to fill in the gaps; but the high level of turnover in the field, and retirement and passing of older colleagues, mean much of the history is being lost. By building a collaborative community site with a rich and growing set of exhibition records at its core, it is our hope that together we will preserve this history and support development of a culture of critique. Many NSF-funded exhibition projects, old and new, have already posted case studies, and we look forward to seeing more. Kathy McLean and Wendy Hancock of the ExhibitFiles team will be at the Summit later this week to help anyone who hasn’t yet registered.

The gathering is organized by the Center for Advancement of Informal Science Education (CAISE), founded in 2007 with NSF support, which is housed at ASTC. CAISE partner organizations include Oregon State University (OSU), the University of Pittsburgh Center for Learning in Out-of-School Environments (UPCLOSE), and Visitor Studies Association (VSA).

It was because of Dan Spock’s informative and thought-provoking review of the Terror House that I found myself there in late May, while I was in Budapest for the ecsite meeting. As it happens, I visited with Andrea Bandelli, who posted his own review the other day, and I shared some of his reactions and reflections. There’s a forced-march quality to the experience, with no place to sit down and think or have a quiet conversation, that makes it hard to address the questions Andrea reminds us of: Why did this happen, and what does it mean for us? (Actually, you could sit, if you wanted to, at the table laid out for Nazi officials.)

There’s no doubt a visit to the Terror House is a powerful experience. Still, I wonder: As captives of a narrative that’s cinematic in its power, are we likelier to leave satisfied that the story is simply over? Is a themed environment that’s polished down to the last detail, lacking in the rough edges of reality, perhaps too smooth for a history of human suffering? Does the implied moral judgment fail to address what Primo Levi called moral gray zones, and thus let us, individually, off the hook? When I visited Dachau in the early 1960s, it was hard to find and starkly real. I wonder if the gritty immediacy made it harder to walk away as if a film had just ended.

Dan notes that the Terror House has stirred controversy within Hungary, at least in part for the very act of remembering it represents. Whatever the advantages and disadvantages of its cinematic interpretive structure, it does create at least one place for highly personal acts of remembrance and reflection, which people have made their own: a row of photographs of people killed after the 1958 revolution that runs around the outside of the building - and under it, a ledge.

What happens when you invite visitors to tell their own stories?

In his recent case study of the Liberty Science Center’s Skyscrapers exhibition, Wayne LaBar described a place among the towering exhibits where visitors can make themselves heard. As Wayne describes it, “Our visitors also have a voice in the story when they write their own memories about tall buildings, when they draw and submit a skyscraper design to be exhibited in the gallery, or when they assemble their own internet-based project, blogging about skyscrapers built in their neighborhood.” Wayne later sent along this postcard, left by one visitor:

Wayne was among the authors who contributed to the recently published book Visitor Voices in Museum Exhibitions (which Kathy McLean and I co-edited), which explores the museum world’s counterpart of citizen journalism: visitors actively commenting on, contributing to, and even creating exhibitions.

A few other ExhibitFiles case studies and reviews mention this kind of “visitor voice” exhibit (like the Cafeteria area in the Science Museum of Minnesota’s Race exhibition), but we know there are more. We hope others will share their experiences, experiments, and reflections here – and tell us how museums are responding to visitors’ contributions.

Are there topics you, or others you know, consider “unexhibitable”? The AAM’s National Association for Museum Exhibition (NAME) wants to hear about them. The Fall 2008 issue of the NAME journal, Exhibitionist, will consider this and related questions, and the editor, Gretchen Jennings, and Boston Museum of Science exhibit developer Maureen McConnell are looking for comments and reflections now. We also hope you’ll share any case studies and reviews here on ExhibitFiles to build up our collective record. We’ve already seen some examples (was the House of Terror in Budapest a concept that would have been considered impossible 30 years ago?).

More specifically, what Gretchen and Maureen want to know is: If there are ideas or topics you consider to be “unexhibitable” — that is, incapable of being made into an engaging museum exhibition — why is that? These are some of the reasons people have already mentioned:

- too controversial or sensitive
- too violent
- too revolting or disgusting
- too abstract
- too ordinary or insignificant
- untimely – could/could not have been exhibited years ago (or perhaps could e in a few years), but not now
- constrained by place – my museum/country could/could not do it, as opposed to another museum/country

On the other hand, if you think there is nothing that cannot be exhibited, could you share your thinking? Post your comments right here in the ExhibitFiles blog — or write to Gretchen or Maureen. If you’re willing to have your comments considered for inclusion in the issue, please respond by June 15 and identify yourself so they can contact you.

ExhibitFiles members can post case studies of exhibits or exhibitions they’ve worked on and write reviews of exhibits (and exhibitions) they’ve visited. Consider contributing your experiences and reflections to this growing resource for the museum field.

You don’t have to complete your post all at once. It’s easy to work a little at a time, save a draft, and go back to it (you’ll find your drafts in your Profile—they’re visible only to you). You can email a draft to a friend. When you’re finished, click on Publish. Even then, you can go back in to make changes (choose the Edit link). Here’s some advice about how to get started:

Gather materials
Include images, a description, list of partners and people who worked on the exhibition, opening date, evaluation report, final project report, links to websites, and NSF grant award number if applicable. Important, too, are your reflections about what you learned and what would be valuable for your colleagues to know about.

Prepare your images
You can upload as many as 25 images. Organize them in the order you want to post them; it’s not yet possible to reorder them once they’re uploaded, and if you add later, that may shuffle the order. When displayed in a Case Study or Review, images are automatically sized (up or down) to 480 by 360 pixels. These images are then “clickable” allowing visitors to view them in their original size.

Start your draft
Log in, click on the “Add” tab, and choose to:
*Create a case study of an exhibition you’ve worked on—or of an exhibit (a single component or part of an exhibition)
*Write a review of an exhibition (or a single exhibit) you’ve seen in person
You’ll now see the entry form with prompts for creating your post.

Draft your post
For a case study of an exhibition, here’s what the form asks. For some items, there are drop-down boxes. * means the item is required.

Exhibition name*
Topic
Subtopic
Museum/organization name*
Museum focus
Exhibition opened in (yyyy)*
Month
Exhibition still open (Y/N)
Traveling exhibition? (Y/N)
City
Country (and for U.S., state)
Exhibition description and goals*
Development process and challenges*
Lessons learned, mistakes we made (and what we did about them)*
Collaborating organization(s) and role (s)
People who worked on this exhibit (or exhibition) Choose “add” for additional text boxes for more than one person
What was your role?
NSF grant number
Other funding source(s)
Estimated cost (less than 100,000 to over 3 million)
Size of exhibition (less than 1,000 sq-feet to over 10,000 sq-feet)
Website(s)
Upload image(s) Click “browse” to find the location of the images on your computer. Up to 25 images can be uploaded. Images should be uploaded in the order you want them to appear. Click on “+caption,” and a text box will appear where you can add a caption for each image.

You can also upload other media files (pdf, doc, mpg, mp3, mp4, mov, swf), evaluation and visitor research reports, and other associated files. If reports are posted on InformalScience.org (or another site), you can link to them.

A review follows a similar, but briefer, pattern, asking where and when you visited the exhibition and what your thoughts were. Check out other reviews to get ideas.

Tip:
In some places you can add multiple items (e.g., names of people who worked on an exhibition, images, associated files). Fill in the box, then click on “add” to open another for your next entry (a new box will appear). Click on the “trash can” icon to delete entries.

For those new to ExhibitFiles, you may be wondering what you can do now that you’ve set up an account. Here are a few ideas:Add a photo to your profile—Log in, click on the Profile tab, and look for “update thumbnail.” Choose “upload a new image” and browse your computer to locate an image of yourself. Mark the part you want as your thumbnail by clicking and dragging the box. Choose “edit profile” to add blog and Flickr feeds.Comment on a case study or review—When you comment, the person who posted the case study or review gets a message and knows someone’s been reading and thinking about the post.Favorite a post—As more material is added to the site, being able to browse by “popularity” helps users find their way around, and the more often a post is favorited, the higher its “popularity” ranking.Contact another member—If you want to get directly in touch with another registered ExhibitFiles member, you can usually contact them through a link in their profile (“contact this member”). To allow other members to contact you, check off a box you’ll find when you edit your profile.Create a case study, write a review—You can work on a draft, email it to someone else, and even after you publish your case study or review, you can still edit it.Tag—Actually, you don’t even have to be logged in to add a tag to a case study or review. This helps make the browse page more useful to everyone.And another tip:Use Firefox—If you don’t have this browser, you can download it free here.

ExhibitFiles reaches a milestone April 23 with the first anniversary of the site’s opening. Started with the support of a committed core group of exhibits people, the site has grown to include more than 650 members from around the world, who have generously shared their experiences and reflections in more than 100 case studies and reviews.

Over the past few months, we’ve fixed some bugs, added open tagging, and built a new browse page that lets users search and sort in a variety of ways. Based on feedback from members, we’re improving image uploading and making plans for a way to post media files with short notes as a quick alternative to longer case studies and reviews.

We also plan to start using this blog to highlight themes that have begun to emerge across a number of case studies and reviews. There’s been encouragement to take on issues that may seem like “downers,” advice about how to work with artists in science centers, the observation “that solid exhibit tradecraft… can make even the silliest subject engaging,” and much more. There’s a lot of experience and wisdom gathered here.

We’re grateful to all who’ve contributed, and to the National Science Foundation for its support. And we look forward to the next year, and beyond.

Wendy

ExhibitFiles is winner of the Best of the Web award for museum professional sites, annnounced today during the Museums & the Web conference in Montreal. The award recognizes achievement in web design for sites that support distributed activity and innovative work among museum professionals.

Congratulations and many thanks to the 636 members who’ve joined up, contributed content, and helped to critique the site, and especially to the core group that’s guided our work. And many thanks to all of the developers and designers at Ideum who’ve been working with us to conceive and build the site.

Wendy

Jim Spadaccini and I are in Montreal at Museums & the Web this week, looking forward to demonstrating the site on Saturday morning. If you’re here, please stop by and give us your ideas as we plan next steps.Wendy